SPACE/COSMOS

'Yikes': While gaming, Musk inadvertently broadcasts 'scary' near-abort of Starship booster landing

TechCrunch · Image Credits:SpaceX

Aria Alamalhodaei
Fri, October 25, 2024 

Elon Musk occasionally posts clips of his video game plays to his social media platform X — but a recent clip includes background audio of a SpaceX engineer telling Musk how the most recent Starship flight test was “one second away” from an abort. The clip, posted on Friday, was caught by Reuters' Joey Roulette on X, but it's not clear if the conversation between Musk and Starship engineers occurred that same day.

“I want to be really upfront about scary shit that happened,” the unnamed engineer said, seemingly as Musk played Diablo IV. He went on to explain that a misconfigured component didn’t have the right “ramp up time for bringing up spin pressure” on the booster.

“We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower,” the engineer says.

“Wow,” Musk says in response. “Yikes.”

The same engineer went on to say that right before engine startup on the booster’s descent back to Earth, a cover on the skin of the booster ripped off, apparently in a place that had been spot welded. “We wouldn't have predicted the exact right place, but this cover that ripped off was right on top of a bunch of the single point failure valves that must work during the landing burn. So thankfully, none of those or the harnessing got damaged, but we ripped this chine cover off over some really critical equipment right as landing burn was starting. We have a plan to address that.”

Musk was being briefed on the fifth Starship integrated test flight, referred to as IFT-5, which took place on October 13. SpaceX set its most ambitious mission objectives yet for that test, including returning the Super Heavy booster to the launch site and catching it with a pair of oversized “chopstick” arms that jut out from the launch tower.

The company pulled it off, and made history as a result. The full context of the conversation is not clear, as the clip posted to X is only about three minutes long, but it shows that even seemingly flawless rocket launches (and in this case, booster landings) can come perilously close to disaster. And that after each test, SpaceX is furnished with a "butt load," as the engineer put it, of post-flight data to inform future testing.

“We’re trying to do a reasonable balance of speed and risk mitigation on the booster” prior to the next flight attempt, the engineer said. The engineers note that this will be the first Starship test flight whose schedule is not set by the FAA. While SpaceX has typically outpaced the regulator in terms of launch readiness, versus the FAA’s launch license approval schedule, the FAA actually gave approval for IFT-5 and IFT-6 at the same time.